Some people swear by writing courses but whether it really helps American poetry I have doubts.

I don't think the creative writing industry has helped American poetry.

I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry.

Teaching writing over the years intrudes on your own writing in important ways taking away some of the excitement of poetry.

The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.

Poetry almost by definition calls attention to its language and form.

The Language Poets are writing only about language itself. The Ashbery poets are writing only about poetry itself. That seems to me a kind of dead end.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

The great watershed of modern poetry is French more than English.

You have to really dive deep back into yourself and get rid of so much modern analytical categorization. It's one of the great things poetry does.

Pound's translation of Chinese poetry was maybe the most important thing I read. Eliot a little bit later.

I think that it's more likely that in my 60s and 70s I will be writing poetry rather than fiction.

Poetry is the most subtle of the literary arts and students grow more ingenious by the year at avoiding it. If they can nip around Milton duck under Blake and collapse gratefully into the arms of Jane Austen a lot of them will.

Poetry isn't a profession it's a way of life. It's an empty basket you put your life into it and make something out of that.

Translation is an interestingly different way to be involved both with poetry and with the language that I've found myself living in much of the time. I think the two feed each other.

There may be more poetry than justice in poetic justice.

On July 26 1916 I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Poetry has the virtue of being able to say twice as much as prose in half the time and the drawback if you do not give it your full attention of seeming to say half as much in twice the time.

A public expectation it has to be said not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.

I think when kids just see well-crafted poetry it's just obtuse to them. It's hard to relate to.

I've always had a love for poetry and when I got signed to a record label I thought 'How odd that I'm doing a record before a book of poetry '

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.

Solitude is very important in my work as a mode of inspiration but isolation is not good in this respect. I am not writing poetry about isolation.